Empowering Teachers and Multilingual Students: Unleashing the Potential of Critical Consciousness to Revolutionize Education's Future

• In Event: Exploring Heterogeneity, Discourse, and Linguistic Awareness in Multilingual Literacy Learning

Abstract

This paper explores how teachers and students interact and discuss themes of language, race, and identity. This paper examines when teachers center their instruction with justice-orientated themes like race and identity, it plays a role in building a teacher's empathy and critical perspective towards those that differ from their identity. This study enriches our comprehension of critical consciousness among elementary school-aged students, focusing on an understudied cohort dedicated to dismantling racial injustice, encompassing multilingual students. Paulo Freire states, “We must take people at the point of emergence by helping them move from naive to critical transitivity, facilitate their intervention in the historical process.” These interventions and the development of critical consciousness occur through “an active, dialogical, critical, and criticism-stimulating method” (Freire, 1973). Children in 4th and 5th grade are at the “point of emergence,” Freire speaks about. We must support their movement from “naive to critical transitivity” so they can begin to think about the complexities of identity, race, and language, which impact their interaction and treatment in society (Freire, 1973).

This paper focuses on data from twelve small-group lesson observations taught with two texts from Unit 3 of the literacy curriculum, Cultivating Linguistic Awareness for Voice and Equity in Schools (CLAVES). This research includes data from two rounds of interviews with teachers and students. Comprehensive field notes were analyzed to identify the behaviors of both teachers and students, as well as their language usage and levels of critical consciousness. The findings from the lesson observations vividly illustrate students' active participation in critical discourse, leading to a deeper comprehension of the intricate nuances surrounding identity and race. The data not only indicates a positive transformation in teachers' capacity for critical engagement but also highlights their role in nurturing students' own critical involvement with the world around them. Student and teacher interview data demonstrate an increased ability to reflect critically. Additionally, based on the interview data, students learn about themes of race and identity, and students with multi-marginalized identities who may not identify with the characters in the books support building their sense of empathy and understanding of other marginalized communities. The data demonstrate that justice-oriented books and engagement in critical discourse empower teachers and students, thereby initiating the process of dismantling systemic racism within educational contexts.

The data displayed when teaching about themes of language, heteroglossic ideologies are present to support the language development of multilingual students and disrupt monoglossic ideologies, which often cause the erasure of multilingual students' use of their home language. The data also revealed teaching with themes of race and identity disrupts the dominant ideas of language like “academic language” and affirms a child's full linguistic repertoire. Therefore, this study contributes to our understanding of multilingualism and multilingual students' schooling experience in a monolingual classroom more generally. This research inspires the idea that schools can be transformative spaces, empowering children to bravely challenge power dynamics and individualistic systems that propagate oppressive messages against marginalized students. Constructing educational possibilities begins with the books we read.

Authors

• Jackelyn Rivera-Orellana, Stanford University

• Rebecca Silverman, Stanford University

• Patrick Proctor, Boston College